Spectrum Auction: C Block Hits Reserve Price — A bid of $4.7 billion this morning for the most valuable group of wireless licenses in the Federal Communications Commission auction for 700Mhz spectrum pushed the price over the minimum price the government set.

C-Block action could slow — Reserve reached, open access becomes reality — Following a few tense rounds without any bids, the nationwide package of eight C-Block licenses picked up a new bid during round 17 to push the potential winning price for the block past the $4.6 billion reserve mark …

Pirate Bay hit with legal action — Four men who run one of the most popular file-sharing sites in the world have been charged with conspiracy to break copyright law in Sweden. — The Pirate Bay's servers do not store copyrighted material but offer links to the download location of films, TV programmes, albums and software.

Google's Marissa Mayer: Social search is the future — At an event in August, Marissa Mayer, Google's leading VP in search, said social search hasn't shown much promise, but if it does, Google would be in a good position to incorporate it. I wrote about that here.

We had a rough night. But now we're back. — I just left the office, at 6am, with most of our engineering and technical operations team. That's only a handful of people, but we were all there all night. — You may have noticed we had an outage last night/stretching into this morning.

Gartner: Apple To Double U.S., Europe PC Share By 2011 — Apple (AAPL) will double its share of the U.S. and Western European PC market share by 2011, the research firm Gartner said today. “Apple's gains in computer market share reflect as much on the failures of the rest of the industry as on Apple's success,” Gartner says.

The internet rewards the lazy and punishes the intrepid — As GPS transceivers become common accessories in cars, the benefits have been manifold. Millions of us have been relieved of the nuisance of getting lost or, even worse, the shame of having to ask a passerby for directions.

OpenSocial should be renamed “OpenGadgets” — As it stands, the Google-led OpenSocial has very little, if anything, to do with data portability. That's the view of Marc Canter, a long time advocate of open standards and data portability, and one in which I'm inclined to agree.